The word 'critical" has three meanings which are dangerous, important, and disapproving. The purpose of this blog is to examine important or over-looked cultural, political, artistic, or historical issues of our time. Also, this blog is intended to be educational.

Monday, January 9, 2017

Little Known History: Columbus Mistakes Manatees For Mermaids

On January 9, 1493, Italian
explorer Christopher Columbus, sailing near the Dominican Republic, sees three
“mermaids” which were in reality manatees and he described them as “not half as
beautiful as they are painted.” Six months earlier, Columbus (1451-1506) set
off from Spain across the Atlantic Ocean with the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria,
hoping to find a western trade route to Asia. Instead, his voyage, the first of
four he would make, led him to the Americas, or “The New World.”

Christopher Columbus

Mermaids, mythical
half-female, half-fish creatures, have existed in seafaring cultures at least
since the time of the ancient Greeks. Typically depicted as having a woman’s
head and torso, a fishtail instead of legs and holding a mirror and comb,
mermaids live in the ocean and, according to some legends, can take on a human
shape and marry mortal men. Mermaids are closely linked to sirens, another
folkloric figure, part-woman, part-bird, who live on islands and sing seductive
songs to lure sailors to their deaths.

Mermaid sightings by
sailors, when they weren’t made up, were most likely manatees, dugongs or
Steller’s sea cows (which became extinct by the 1760s due to over-hunting).
Manatees are slow-moving aquatic mammals with human-like eyes, bulbous faces
and paddle-like tails. It is likely that manatees evolved from an ancestor they
share with the elephant. The three species of manatee (West Indian, West
African and Amazonian) and one species of dugong belong to the Sirenia order.
As adults, they’re typically 10 to 12 feet long and weigh 800 to 1,200 pounds.
They’re plant-eaters, have a slow metabolism and can only survive in warm
water.

Manatees live an average of
50 to 60 years in the wild and have no natural predators. However, they are an
endangered species. In the U.S., the majority of manatees are found in Florida,
where scores of them die or are injured each year due to collisions with boats.